Paul Elliott, puppetmaster?

By BEN SMITH

10/03/2011 05:31 PM EDT

Environmental groups opposed to the Keystone XL pipeline for policy reasons who have zeroed in on the allegedly sinister role of a former Hillary Clinton staffer named Paul Elliott, who exchanged emails including emoticons (gasp!) with an obscure American official in the American foreign service in Ottawa.

The emails do seem to indicate that he was personal friends with the official, one Marja Verloop, and I'm not dismissing the claim that she seemed to be sympathetic to a project that, in fact, the Administration supports.

But I couldn't help being struck by the extrapolation in this Times story, which echoes environmental groups' claims of his influence:

Before he was TransCanada’s chief Washington lobbyist, Paul Elliott was a top official in Mrs. Clinton’s failed 2008 presidential campaign.

(The Times earlier wrote of Elliott: "Its principal lobbyist is a man named Paul Elliott. Remember him? He was a deputy director of Hilary Clinton’s presidential campaign three years ago.")

Actually, you would be forgiven for not remembering Elliott from the campaign. I covered the campaign, and have also known Elliott casually from his time in New York politics, where he worked for Carl McCall and Bill Mulrow, as well as for Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and had forgotten he worked on Clinton's campaign, much less that he served as a "top official."

One of the handful of people who ran Clinton's campaign didn't remember either when I inquired just now about Elliott's role. Another reminded me: Elliott worked under Harold Ickes on the campaign's ill-fated delegate operation.

"Paul Elliott wasn't considered a top official by anyone on the campaign, and no idea where deputy campaign director title is coming from," a third former Clinton campaign aide emails. "He was one of three main people who helped oversee our delegate program. NYT and others are overstating his influence on the campaign and thus the influence he would have with State."

So while the lobbying story is certainly interesting, the claims that TransCanada has some secret line to Clinton-land seem a bit overstated.

UPDATE: Elliott emails, "On the Hillary Clinton for president campaign, its true I was not a senior official, I was responsible for getting the candidate's name on the ballot in countless states and hand picking nearly two thousand pledge delegates committed to former Senator Clinton. I know what my title was on the campaign but I could care less now. What matters to me is that no one has the right to diminish the sacrifice I made for a cause I believed in.... You and I didn't talk because it wasn't my job to spend my days chatting care free. I had a responsibility to ensure the nomination viability of one of the most serious contenders for the office of the U.S. Presidency."

Elliott also notes that he worked on Clinton campaigns in 1996 and 2000. And the slight was not intended: I didn't intend to diminish his role as much as to diminish the conspiracy theories about him.